[Box Backup] Client on laptop questions/suggestions

[Ben Summers]

On 21 Jun 2004, at 13:44, John Pybus wrote:

> Ben Summers wrote:
>
>> How about I add a feature which runs a script before every potential 
>> sync, and if the script says "no" doesn't do the sync? Or, it returns 
>> "now" to do it now, or a number of seconds to wait before considering 
>> a sync again.
>
> That sounds ideal.  Another thing that occurs to me with laptop use, 
> you often don't want anything touching disc when on battery, so it 
> would be better for this script to get a chance to say no before 
> directories are scanned for changes.

OK, here you are:

   http://www.fluffy.co.uk/boxbackup/bin/syncallowpatch-0.06PLUS1.tgz

instructions within the archive. Works with 0.06PLUS1 only. Let me know 
how you get on.

>
>> If you do this, you will lose the RAM based database of the states of 
>> directories on the server. This means that when it connects again, it 
>> will read the contents of every directory on the server, rather than 
>> just the ones it knows have changed. This may not be a problem for 
>> you.
>> I do mean to write some code to serialise this state to disc, and 
>> then have a daemon-less mode for snapshot syncs. Not difficult, it's 
>> even written with this in mind. However, no-one's requested it yet, 
>> and I haven't needed it.
>
> For now I'll leave bbackupd running and see how much impact it 
> actually has (for starters just running boxbackup on my own laptop), 
> but the option to save to disc would be good.

Although the other reason I haven't bothered is because when the OS' 
swaps the unused process to disc, it'll have much the same effect as 
writing a file.

Ben